Protesters join together during a rally in front of the Miramar ICE detention facility on the National Day of Action for Children on June 1, 2018 in Miramar, Florida. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

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Features » June 6, 2018

Never Mind the Wall—They’re Building Warehouses for Immigrant Children

The newest plank of immigration enforcement? Piling children into overcrowded detention centers.

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These detention facilities are no place for kids.

Most mornings lately, I’ve woken up to two things. First I hear my toddler, sounding off that it’s time to get up. Then I see the news stories about other toddlers our immigration authorities ripped away from their parents.

For weeks, I’ve felt the gnawing need to write something, anything, about it. But God, where even to begin?

First, there are the stories. The Congolese asylum seeker who heard her six year old scream, “Don’t take me away from my mommy!” and couldn’t reach her. The woman forced to put her 18 month old in a car seat in an ICE van, the door slamming shut before she could even say goodbye. The man who hasn’t seen his son in six months.

Then there are the photos. The rows of children sleeping on thin mats behind chain-linked fences. The kids being led by guards to make phone calls, hands tied behind their backs. The prison van full of infant car seats.

These are just the earliest fruits of the Trump administration’s ghastly new pledge to prosecute every last undocumented immigrant who crosses our border. If immigrant parents have their children with them, the kids are seized and warehoused in some overflowing detention facility.

The New York Times counted over 700 kids who’d been separated from their parents this way from October to April. But in the first two weeks of May alone, authorities disclosed that they’d taken nearly 700 more—an astonishingly rapid increase. Already the warehouses are filling up, leaving authorities to prepare holding pens on military bases for the inevitable overflow. The ACLU puts the second wave at 1,000 over five weeks.​

In theory, the children should be released to other family members within 72 hours. But with the administration essentially threatening to deport any undocumented caretakers who come forth to claim them, more and more children are languishing in cells for months. NBC reported recently that over half the kids currently detained had been held past the limit, and that half of those were under 12.

“It appears we’re setting up a long-term incarceration system for children,” a former immigration official told VICE. Children whose only crime was having parents who tried to take them to safety.

The jackboots orchestrating this plot openly admit they’re willing to harm children to scare off parents.

“If you don’t want your child separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally,” menaced Attorney General Jeff Sessions. “A big name of the game is deterrence,” chimed in Trump chief of staff John Kelly, who promised the captured children “will be put into foster care—or whatever.”

The administration isn’t just arresting ordinary migrants. It’s also arresting asylum seekers who legally present themselves at ports of entry—people fleeing war, crime, and trauma few Americans could understand—and taking their kids, too.

These detention facilities are no place for kids. Even going back to the Obama era, immigration agents have been reported raping, beating and threatening kids in their care. When U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley tried to inspect a holding site this month, operators locked him out and called the police. What were they hiding?

The United Nations has warned these detentions constitute “a child rights violation” and should be “halted immediately.” Senator Dianne Feinstein has introduced a bill to end family separations for asylum seekers, while Senator Kamala Harris and Rep. Pramila Jayapal want to halt the expansion of new detention facilities.

Those would be welcome steps. But if you ask the dad in me, they should shut down the whole agency.

This article was jointly published by In These Times and Foreign Policy In Focus.

Peter Certo is the editorial manager of the Institute for Policy Studies. He edits its Foreign Policy In Focus and OtherWords services and coaches writing in the New Economy Maryland Fellowship program. He’s a former associate editor of Right Web, a project that monitors efforts to influence U.S. foreign policy, and helped coordinate the first annual Global Day of Action on Military Spending.

I said nothing in defense of removing children from their families, Pretty Tarbaby.

how stupid are you than you neither read well nor refrain from bathetic simplisticism?

Posted by fuster on 2018-06-10 22:15:37

And you defend the removal of children from their families, their placement in what can only be described as concentration camps, and their release to human traffickers. Congrats, the right wing has deluded you into becoming a nazi.

Posted by Pretty Tarable on 2018-06-10 14:42:21

Ask me what choices the parents could have made that would guarantee to prevent this!

Posted by CENSORED on 2018-06-10 14:00:31

How many of those desperate people are actually refugees escaping murder in their home lands....they aren't breaking any laws they are seeking asylum.....

Posted by angryspittle on 2018-06-09 08:56:02

they don't come for the children. they come to place the law-breaking parent into custody.

you're bassackward

Posted by fuster on 2018-06-08 23:29:07

taking little children away from their parents is heartbreaking....but when the parents have broken the law and are getting placed in custody, what else can be done with the kids?

should having small children make someone immune to arrest? are the kids to be used as a free pass?

Posted by fuster on 2018-06-08 23:28:20

The U.S. government is an evil institution. As horrible as the treatment of these children is, at least they're not being bombed into oblivion or have multiple limbs blown off in some country halfway around the world where the U.S. has no business sticking its big fat nose.